Archive for 2006

In America, the car has long been a symbol of that most American attribute, the spirit of independence. But for those who first got their drivers license in the 1950s and 1960s, and there are millions of us, the time to consider when not to drive may not be far away.

June E. Snow remembers the day in October 2003 when her 1984 Ford Tempo just would not start. Snow, then 77, knew that repairs would be costly, and that insurance payments and her AAA dues were coming due. So she walked back into her Falmouth, Maine, apartment and made the phone call she’d been dreading. She had the Tempo towed away, never to be replaced.

In 1988, Katherine Freund’s 3-year-old son, Ryan, was crossing a street outside their home when he was badly injured by an 84-year-old driver, who later said he thought he’d hit a dog. For Freund, it was an abrupt and unfortunate introduction to the issue of older drivers. Freund later studied public policy in graduate school and learned that although the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had a department examining the issue, and though older drivers had among the highest rates of fatal crashes per mile driven, still, nobody had a good solution. So she made the issue her cause. Wayne Curtis spoke with Freund at her office in Westbrook, Maine.